Poet Dean Young to Read Tuesday

The reading is free, open to the public. Assisted listening devices are available upon request. Young’s reading will be followed by a book sale and signing. For further information, see the Smith College News Release.

An inventive and vital voice in American letters, Young first fell in love with poetry during his childhood in Pennsylvania, when in the third grade he “started writing and never stopped.” After earning his master of fine arts degree from Indiana University, Young went on to garner much recognition, including the Academy Award in Literature as well as a Stegner Fellowships from Stanford University. He has published 12 books of poetry, including, most recently, Fall Higherand Bender: New & Selected Poems.

For more than a decade, Young lived with a degenerative heart disease. In 2011, just days after receiving a life-saving heart transplant, he published Fall Higher. Written before the transplant—at a time when, at its weakest point, his heart was pumping at 8 percent of what it should have been—the poems in this collection are infused with an acute awareness of mortality.